Investigative research:

August, 2022

 

Or, how does low-quality childcare keeps The Netherlands short on qualified teachers, children with underdeveloped potential, and parents blindfolded about what's happening behind closed doors of their kids` nursery?

 

In "Child Care in The Netherlands: Trends in Quality Over the Years 1995-2005," researchers from Leiden University, University of Amsterdam, and Radboud University Nijmegen unveiled a hard truth. 

 

"The average quality of center-based child care had declined. Compared with care in 1995, when low quality was not encountered at all, low-quality care in 2001 was encountered in 6% of the groups. In addition, differences in the quality of care between 1995 and 2001 were evident, especially regarding language and learning activities."

 

Two decades after the 2001 drop in Dutch childcare quality, are we still on a negative downward spiral when it comes to educating our children? That calls for another deep sector investigation, especially with the Dutch government's decision to open the doors for national and foreign investors to buy Dutch nursery institutions.

 

There are many ways to perform an investigation. Still, one of the best and most revealing ones is infiltration and on-the-field observation. One would think that professions like an undercover agent and a preschool teacher are two different galaxies. However, pedagogical work in The Netherlands can prove the perfect place to unite the two. 

 

The current investigative article reveals a Montessori-trained Psychologist's one-year on-the-field research and internship observation of 5+ traditional and alternative education kindergartens in South Holland. Initially, I had no idea that my pedagogical specialization would soon turn into undercover nursery research. However, it did because of repeated bad practices I observed in preschools on and on again.

 

I saw approaches that, apart from leaving me angry, undoubtedly hurt children's human rights and could incur psychological scars, traumatizing them for a lifetime. 

 

To name a few striking examples:

 

• Children left unattended, grabbing kitchen knives;
• Forced-feeding;
• Pampers are changed only twice a day and leaving kids with wet diapers in the hot summer months;
• Kids - are locked out (literally!) to play in the yard for a quick 5-10 mins so that teachers can get a breather;
• Babies - left in cradles to cry themselves to sleep for 30+ minutes, without emotional soothing or even any educators` presence in the sleeping room;
• 2-3 y.o. children watching animated movies for as long as 40 minutes to 1 hour in some cases;
• Disproportioned free play and almost no planned psychomotor or art activities;
• 4 y.o. kids who don't know how to use aquarelle paint;
• Scarce or not adequately utilized resources - having Christmas books on classroom display for children's use during the summer;
• Rewards and punishments models - giving stickers only for "good" behavior;
• Authoritative approaches using negative conditioning phrases towards children like "you lost your choice";
• Teachers - "glued" to their phones and treating them with more significance than the kids;
• Children objectified;
• Educators "used" conveniently to multitask and cost-save the owners 2-3 other monthly salaries for cooks, catering, cleaning services, and groceries delivery at the very least;
• Burnout all around and parental misleading;
• Sugarcoated images on schools` social media hide the deeper circles of the cost-saving model, dragging along disunion from proper, high-quality education and actual human care.

 

When I decided to become a Montessori-trained teacher, I had never imagined ever wishing to participate in such an investigation. Yet - when I saw more crying children in a day than I have seen in a whole month in my teaching career that inevitably led me to the conclusion that I should speak up. Yes, I was already captivated by something more significant, unaddressed, and even unknown to many affected people! So, I embarked on a journey to strip off the mask of care and sweetness parents, and governmental inspectors see in the brief moments they are inside a school. 

 

What seems like the world's end is sometimes a blessing in disguise.

 

Moreover, I knew this was a pivotal moment for the Dutch childcare system. Vivid social discussions were already going on about the decision to sell Dutch kindergartens to private investors, typically portrayed as greedy villains, ready to dip their hands in the honey.

 

Knowing well the desperately low pedagogical and managerial quality in some (thank God, not all!) kindergartens, my fixer side pondered at investors from a new perspective. Since they can renovate the school system and do it fast, weren't they a blessing rather than a threat? Also, one question hectically occupied my mind:

 

Suppose a vast number of the nurseries in the country needed urgent financial injection to re-train their personnel and equip themselves with new, adequate materials for the psychomotor and emotional development of the children. How do we solve this dilemma, then? Governments typically don't have so much ready capital to pour into the sector. Overcharging parents is not a great idea either - especially after the hard times of COVID-19 we've all been through in the last two and a half years and the current economic recession. Aren't the investors the right solution, then? I saw a screaming social need for educational reform that investors got the means to solve, considering a knowledgeable Pedagogical expert guided them.

 

Yet, maybe you ask yourself, was I scared to show up with these bold statements?

 

Oh, yes!  I still am scared, just like anyone who dared to go undercover and question the status quo.

 

Will I be penalized for the boldness?

 

Who am I to raise a doubt or try to be a reformer in a foreign country?

 

What if I create enemies and step on someone's toes - I mean - interests?

 

However, something broke open in me after I:

 

1. Had to defrost deeply frozen soup for 30 mins in a row in a microwave to serve kids` lunch;
2. Seeing ten children at the age of 3 y.o. being exposed to 30 mins animated movies before noon nap; and
3. After witnessing a failed potty training - all on the same day. 

So I started asking myself what parents would say and, more importantly, DO if they saw all this.

 

What would I do if I was a parent?

 

I only needed one more "special" day – the last straw on the camel's back, to take the firm and final decision to write this article - it was a day in another kindergarten where I felt like someone had thrown me in a movie by Kafka. My ears started hurting from listening to babies crying; babies put to sleep in "prisoner" bars, old-school cradles in a far-away room without the supervision of an adult. Yet, that's not all. When I asked if I should cuddle a crying baby, my colleagues told me with surgical cold-bloodedness:

"No! Leave them! They need to get used to it and learn!"

"Get used to what?!" - I was utterly stunned - "To be conditioned that their needs are unimportant. Or that they should "learn" to suppress emotions?"

 

Sensitive responsiveness refers to how a caregiver recognizes children's individual emotional and physical needs and responds appropriately and promptly to their cues and signals (Ainsworth, Blehar, Waters, & Wall, 1978). It is considered the critical aspect of caregiving in attachment theory (Ainsworth et al., 1978; Bolwby, 1969). Yet how severe an insecure attachment were those Dutch teachers forming in children by ignoring their distress?

 

When I witnessed such a profound lack of sensitive responsiveness, all my fears were replaced by radical courage to speak.

 

Breaking from the norm. Surpassing the convenience of reaching the exceptional

 

The institutions in Childcare, and, in fact, any institution, thrive in self-maintained homeostasis, which perpetuates their current good and bad practices. One such example is a common practice maintained by almost everyone in the sector - setting the lowest possible salary thresholds for Pedagogic employees.

 

During my investigative research, I did on-site observations in kindergartens and many off-site interviews with teachers, trainees, and Recruiters from the field. For example, an ex-HR in a kindergarten (observed by me) later disclosed in a private conversation that "underpay in the sector has grown to be almost a blindly followed norm, and this is something he, as an HR professional, has always had an ethical problem with."

 

The truth is, aside from the short-term gratification of cost-saving, underpaying is keeping Childcare doomed to a chronic lack of enough qualified employees. That is especially true nowadays with the boom of all sorts of reskilling and upskilling digital options available for anyone in the post-COVID19 era.

 

Thanks to reading multiple public reports, I am aware that government strictly controls how many interns a nursery hires to prevent breeding underpay and any security incidents that may stem from lack of experience. While that is great, things can be taken further by measures like:

• RAISING THE SALARIES in all the relevant Pedagic worker national Payscale levels in the Collective labor agreement for Childcare;
• Enforce a law for PAID TRIAL DAYS at preschools.

 

Seriously, do the math of how many free hours per year Childcare gets from teachers` free trial days?

 

 

You don't need rocket science and spaceships to discover the truth of how good a nursery is

 

Typically, many quality gaps become easily detectable by anyone within just 10-15 mins spent in most preschools. Unless the management makes ongoing efforts to train their employees, innovate the material base and digitalize their practices, the below-listed problems or a combination of them can occur:

 

• Teachers – on a treadmill;
• Multitasking with sky-high job requirements and burnout twist;
• Underdeveloped children and missed opportunities to harness children's "absorbent mind";
• Parents – lullabied;
• Government mislead.

 

So this article is in no way meant as a harsh critique towards either one school or methodology, but rather as a call for the need to reform the childcare educational system worldwide. So let's go to the details, shall we?

 

Teachers – on a treadmill

 

Like HORECA or many other fields after COVID-19, the Childcare sector also experiences challenges in finding teachers willing to stay for more than a few months. Labeling this as a substantial human capital crisis would be a bare understatement. However, before we blame these "ungrateful creatures" - the educators, for not taking the abundant childcare work opportunities, let's first try to look at their position through the eyes of someone who worked in the system.

 

Mostly, the day starts early (8:00 am) and rolls down the clock with huffing and puffing and counting the minutes till 6:00 pm (sometimes even 7:00 pm). Rarely do employees have any proper place inside the Childcare - where they can take a refreshing pause. Teacher rooms or relaxation/ meditation spaces are either non-exist or too small. In most preschools I investigated, the educators were making 9 hrs. Work shifts (e.g., 8 am to 6 pm). Even with a 1 hr. lunch break, shifts are above the recommended daily 8 hr. maximum, especially for a demanding profession like this.

 

Education is a two-way street. The exceptional teachers need exceptional school management. Entrapped in the vicious cycle of lack of personnel, preschools couldn't devote themselves to employee training and children's activities. Instead, they focused on having enough staff to survive the week, "firefighting" emergencies, and gripping for "dear life."

 

 

Multitasking with sky-high job requirements and burnout twist

 

Let's not ignore another trend - imposing too many unreasonable requirements on teachers` backs, such as the need for them to speak fluent Dutch by Jan 2025. No matter if you work exclusively in an English-speaking International daycare center. Another expert from the sector I interviewed questioned the value of such regulation. According to them, it would only bring more social segregation and displace foreigners from the job market.

 

What's more, in the Netherlands, it is still expected that teachers cannot work the flex hours they choose. Yes, that's the country that first declared the right to home office as a universal human right. Instead, they are required to do a minimum of three days. So maybe the sector crisis is a reminder that it is high time for some flexibility to keep any decent teacher for longer.

 

Especially considering the finding in the ResearchGate article "Child Care in The Netherlands: Trends in Quality Over the Years 1995-2005" that "less experienced and less educated caregivers who worked fewer hours per week provided a higher quality of care. An explanation offered for these unexpected results was work pressure: Caregivers with fewer years of experience in child care and work fewer hours per week may cope better with unfavorable working conditions and restricted career perspectives than caregivers with more experience and work longer hours".

 

Underdeveloped children and missed opportunities to harness children's "absorbent mind." 

 

Furthermore, this stagnation in HR management badly affects the school program development and the time left to do team meetings, creativity sessions, or preliminary preparation of new classroom activities. Ultimately, that robs the children's development and leaves them starved for planned, structured activities for emotional psycho-social development. For example, I have not seen planned activities for 3-4 days in a row or even a week-long at some preschools - all kids did was free play. 

 

Even though "in 2011, caregiver education changed from social-pedagogic work (SPW) to pedagogic work (PW), which now educates students to work with children from 0 to 12 years old in child care or children up to age 18 in child welfare", one thing has remained unchanged 11 years later. It is the quite persistent tendency of Dutch Childcare to CARE rather than to EDUCATE, which I have observed in numerous kindergartens. As we can read in the University of Amsterdam publication "Childcare quality in The Netherlands: From Quality Assessment to Intervention,": "Both in Dutch caregiver education and everyday child care practice, the focus typically lies on care rather than on education, which is also reflected by the fact that most time of the program for young children in child care centers consists of free play and little attention is given to structured developmental activities (Oberhuemer, Schreyer, & Neuman, 2010; OECD, 2006)."

 

Sadly, this is far too scarce compared to the Montessori Method, in which I am certified and gained experience in Spain. Children aged 0-4 and 4-6 have the so-called "absorbent mind" potential - which means they study languages easily just by listening to them and learning new things extremely fast.

Hence, to unlock their absorbent mind potential, they need constant emotional, linguistic, and psycho-social engagement from the teacher in a structured and non-structured way.

A good rhythm would involve:

 

• Two circle times a day (with reading, storytelling, show & tell, or singing activity);
• At least one planned activity (art, math, writing, yoga, dance); 
• On some occasions - One practical life lesson - for example, a museum visit;
• During the rest of the time - free play.

 

As you can see, the difference between the actual delivery and the prescribed standard is unignorably visible. 

 

Parents – lullabied 

 

Or we better say "blindfolded"?

 

Sadly, the children have the least power in low-quality Childcare. They have no voice, so I hope this article becomes their voice that echoes loud and clear and brings the necessary educational transformations worldwide. After the little ones, the second most vulnerable group to consider is the parents. Bringing their kids with so much love and all the accompanying worries, the anxiety of the first separations often gets blurred with work and life stress. Hence, it becomes harder for them to identify if there is a deeper problem in the kindergarten.

 

On the other hand, trainees and teachers have the power to speak. However, they often opt out of using it, fearing managerial retaliation or even losing their jobs.

 

How would I blame them?! I suffered the same choking suffocation before I picked up my pen and paper. For good! In the so-described complex situation, one active player stays. 

 

The government! Mislead?

 

And that calls for one burning question!

 

Does the government over-credit kindergartens and unintentionally leave them holding all the cards? In this one-year research, I observed various kindergartens' disbelief toward the government. The scope and severity of mistrust varied from passive-aggressive external-locus of control comments like, I quote precisely: "oh, the inspectors try to be picky towards our work, so via kindergartens` penalty charges they can earn back some of the money they drained down during COVID-19 measures" to outrageous claims and revelations like "Omg, yesterday we had an inspection. But we managed to pull it off good. Thank God they visited us at lunchtime when most of the children were calm. Pure luck".

 

There's a lot to be done to avoid this tricksters attitude, like:

 

• Sending a team of at least 1 Pedagogical expert and Governmental employee as silent observers;
• Staying longer on-site - at least 3-4 hrs, which will allow sufficient time window to capture any underlying discrepancies, as let's face it - no one can pretend forever;
• Discuss and ratify rules and regulations for investors` obligations towards the Childcare sector upon entry into it. Such procedures can be, for example:
•  Legal requirement to allocate a specific budget for transforming, modernizing, and democratizing the school they have bought;
• Forming an innovative multidisciplinary team to manage the school.

 

I don't pretend to be the best teacher on earth - I know I have plenty more to learn daily. Also, I make mistakes like anyone. However, I do realize that constant improvement and striving to be better is what we should do individually, communally, nationally, and internationally.

 

I started this research out of my pure passion for the teaching profession and empathy for children.

 

I finish this research with the hope that it can contribute to the currently proposed reform of the Dutch childcare system of letting investors (including foreign ones) "buy" kindergartens in The Netherlands. 

 

For example, many may know that Canadian private equity company Onex owns huge childcare organizations in the country like Partou and Smallsteps. In addition, an FD paper from March this year reports that “15% of Dutch childcare businesses are owned by large scale-investors, and employers and the government pay 70% of nursery and after-school club costs”. Yet, despite these relatively low figures, the number of investors grows significantly from month to month.

 

Adhering to high standards, vivid collaboration, and trust between investors, the government, and kindergartens themselves will determine the success of the reform and whether investors` entry would be a grizzly grip (like many fear) or a gentle caress for the childcare sector.